Last year I became incensed that Strand Releasing was too cheap to book LA screenings for Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur, and so I asked HE readers for donations and raised enough to pay for three or four screenings. Now I’m wondering if Side by Side, the upcoming and very worthwhile doc about the great transiation from celluloid to digital, also needs a little HE charity work. Because I’m feeling those anemic vibes again.

Side by Side‘s distributor, Tribeca Film, and IDPR, the p.r. firm hired to promote it, haven’t booked any L.A. or N.Y. screenings yet, and it opens in LA and NY in about three and four weeks, respectively. (The VOD debut is 8.22.) Instead Tribeca and IDPR are offering to send DVD screeners to those who want them. Which, no offense, is a bullshit, half-assed way of promoting a film. I’m a Side by Side fan, and so right away I began wondering if Tribeca really cares.

I realize that many critics and journalists keep up with new releases via DVD screeners. It’s a perfectly servicable way of putting a film “out there,” and for all I know some critic-journalists prefer home viewing. But if you want critics and journalists and word-of-mouth starters to really pay attention to a film, you have to get them to come to a screening room. Screenings are a way of saying you mean business. It’s a way of saying “we really want you to sit down in a dark room together and study our film because it genuinely deserves your utmost attention.”

I know what I’m talking about when I say that DVD screeners never get that. Most of the time you’re multi-tasking or on the phone while watching them. You’ll wind maybe half-watching or two-thirds watching, but never 100%. Sometimes the film gets a third of your attention. Sometimes you wind up watching it in segments. Sometimes you’ll watch it late at night and nod out on the couch.

This morning I wrote 35 or 40 name-brand critics and columnists to ask if they’ve seen Side by Side, and except for three who saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival, one who saw it last February in Berlin and one who’s expecting to receive a screener, everyone I’ve heard back from said no, they haven’t seen it, haven’t been contacted, haven’t heard about screenings or generally don’t have Side by Side on their radar.

So it seems to me that Tribeca Film is dilly-dalllying. Which is a way of saying that the film’s producer, Keanu Reeves‘ Company Films, is also dicking around with a nickle-and-dime, wing-and-a-prayer attitude. Am I to understand that Keanu doesn’t want to cough up two or three grand to pay for screening-room showings in NY and LA? That’s not a lot of dough, bro. Didn’t you make anything on those Matrix films?

I was told this morning that Tribeca will start getting serious about getting people to see Side by Side starting on August 1st. Fine. But if I wanted to kill Side by Side, I would play it exactly and precisely as Tribeca and IDPR have so far — no early interviews, no buzz, no long-lead screenings, no energy, NO NOTHING. In their defense Keanu has been directing a Tai-Chi film in China, and Chris Kenneally, the director of Side by Side, has been wandering around Southeast Asia and more or less unreachable for a long stretch.

Keanu will be doing a press day on Tuesday, August 7th. (I’ve got the IDPR invite in my inbox.) Which is 11 days from now with almost no one having seen it or even aware that they should see it. Is this any way to run an airline?

I get the concept of operating within a budget but I really like Side by Side and I cannot stand idly by. I just can’t.

Film isn’t entirely gone from the movie-production landscape, but anyone who thinks it’s not on the verge of obsolescence has a needle in his/her arm. The realization that digital movies and digital projection are completely capable of and in fact destined to kick film out of the room for good has only settled in within the last three or four years. And as recently as 12 or 14 years ago digital was seen a joke that only the DOGMA guys and various no-account indie directors were working with.

So we’ve all been witness to a major technological revolution, and it really needs to be fully pondered and studied from this and that angle. It’s too seismic and seminal to ignore.

Side by Side is already a wee bit dated, or so a cinematographer friend told me when we watched it together a couple of weeks ago. Things move very quickly these days in a technical sense so you have to pounce quickly and cut it together and get it out there chop-chop.

Side by Side probably felt a tad more relevant when it was first shown at last February’s Berliniale and then Manhattan’s Tribeca Film Festival in April, but it’s still a highly intelligent sizing-up of the situation. It tells you what you know or have heard, but it’s a very soothing and stimulating thing to consider what’s happened over the last 14 or so years in one tight 99-minute presentation. It’s wonky, yes, but it’s cut and presented in such a way that even the dumbest, most ADD-afflicted Eloi dilletante will be able to get into it, and yet it’s well-ordered and sophisticated enough to intrigue those who know all about this transition, which, to put it mildly, has been traumatic for many thousands of people in the film industry and beyond.

I think it’s easily one the best made and most absorbing docs of the year.

So I’m of the opinion that Side by Side is not only smart and fascinating, but very necessary to see here and now because every so often we all have to take stock of where we are and where we’ve been, and this is one of those occasions. In short it’s important — it goes over everything and reminds us where things were not so long ago, and where we are today and are likely to be in 10 or 20 or 50 years.

Plus it assembles all of the leading and necessary hotshots in a single room, so to speak — interviewer Keanu Reeves plus Chris Nolan (a non-fan of digital), David Fincher, George Lucas, Steven Soderbergh, James Cameron, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Richard Linklater, Danny Boyle and dps Vilmos Zsigmond, Wally Pfister (who hates digital), Reed Morano, Michael Chapman and digital pioneer Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot The Celebration, the first significant digital feature, as well as the digitally-captured, oscar-winning Slumdog Milllionaire. Plus producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura and actress Greta Gerwig.

The film’s best line is from Soderbergh as he talks about his delight with the digital RED camera, and how working with it led him to realize that “for me, this is the year zero” and that “I feel I should call up film and say, ‘I’ve met somebody.'”

Not everyone is a fan. A friend who saw Side by Side in Berlin feels it’s “superficial crap for the most part, to say nothing of inordinately pro digital with very few dissenting voices save for Christopher Nolan and no mention at all of the problems with digital archiving, which is the real elephant in the room.”

I replied that Side by Side is a primer about the fundamentals for people who don’t know the fundamentals, but it’s also intelligent and sophisticated as far as it goes, and it talks to pretty much everyone who matters, and that it DOES get into the archive question at the end, noting that we’ve seen dozens of video formats surface and disappear over the decades and that they always change and degrade, and that celluloid is the only 100% reliable or trustable way to archive so that you know your film will be accessible 100 or 500 years from now.

Posted on 8.25.06: “When I was living in my cockroach-infested, struggling-young-journalist Soho pad in the late ’70s, there were all those Jean Michel Basquiat SAMO graffiti pieces painted all over Soho and the Bowery. SAMO (i.e., ‘same old shit’) was Basquiat’s graffiti alter-ego, and I remember being a bit disappointed when I met Basquiat himself on a street corner (or was it inside a store?) in ’78 or ’79 and he told me it was pronounced ‘same-oh’. I had always preferred ‘SAM-oh.’

“Some of the slogans were ‘SAMO 4 The Sedate,’ ‘SAMO as a neo art form,’ ‘Do I Have To Spell It Out? SAMO,’ ‘SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy’ and ‘SAMO as an escape clause.’

“Anyway, I’ve never forgotten a certain SAMO graffiti that said the poiltical power of McDonalds had become equal to that of the CIA or the Vatican. I saw it somewhere near Broadway and Prince. That was something like a Major Moment for me, burned into my brain. McDonald’s = pernicious, anti-human, scourge of cvilization.

“McDonalds is a bit on the wane these days. In this country, anyway. The fearsome corporate franchise beast of 2006 is Starbucks, of course. Which is why I paid attention a week or so ago to that story about actor Rupert Everett joining forces with his Bloomsbury district neighbors to try and prevent a Starbucks outlet from moving into the neighborhood.”

What, if anything, has changed in the last six years? What, if anything, would Basquiat be saying in a SAMO vein about whatever he would be sensing in a cultural-spiritual-political vein about mid-2012?

I got more enjoyment out of this three-cubs-in-a-dumpster video (which is roughly two days old) than anything in the opening ceremonies at the London Olympics. I’ve always been a cross between a “watch the highlights after it’s all over” type of guy and a “watch the story of this or that Olympic athlete in a touching movie five or ten years later” type of guy.

You’ve Been Trumped, Anthony Baxter‘s doc about Donald Trump‘s construction of a golf course in Scotland, has become “the highest-rated British film of all time on IMDB,” reportsTheWrap‘s Steve Pond. The doc’s user rating of 8.5 makes it statistically “better than Lawrence of Arabia, better than The Bridge on the River Kwai, better than The King’s Speech, better than any other British production ever,” Pond notes.

Have I been invited to a press screening of You’ve Been Trumped? In New York, yeah. But in Los Angeles? Of course not.

HE Reader: “Have you been following the fan reaction to the rumor of The Hobbit being partitioned into three parts? I’ve been around to different sites, and as far as I can tell at least 85% of the reaction is negative. Even those who are huge fans and anticipating next December want no part of this. Curious to know if this reaction is tempering enthusiasm for such a move. For the record, I’m very much against it as well.”

Me: “My interest in The Hobbit has solely to do with the 48 frame-per-second format, which Warner Bros. has clearly been panicking about and backpedaling on since Cinemacon. On its own story merits, I couldn’t give less of a shit. Without 48 fps, I would suggest releasing The Hobbit as one long film so as to get it over with as quickly as possible.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has used a list from EW‘s Dave Karger of potential award-season contenders that will bow in Toronto as a kind of stalking-horse diving board….BUMP!…BUMP-bump-bump-buh-buh-buh!…so she can post a second list of potential Toronto stand-outs. And here I am running both their lists and going “okay, maybe, maybe, yes, naaah, maybe, no way!” and so on.

Karger’s Toronto contenders: Anna Karenina, Argo, Cloud Atlas, Hyde Park on Hudson, The Impossible, The Place Beyond the Pines, The Sessions, The Silver Linings Playbook, To the Wonder, Rust and Bone.

HE responses: Karenina‘s cup runneth over, abounding with the right choices and buffings as director Joe Wright does Tolstoy proud but…but!…the odds suggest only one heavyweight period drama will be Best Picture nominated, and that’ll be Les Miserables. There’s no reason to suspect or presume that Ben Affleck and Argo won’t be looking very good after Toronto (and perhaps after Telluride), but it’s a plot-driven “escape from Iran” movie and I wonder what kind of thematic undercurrent it’ll contain. Festival huzzahs for Cloud Atlas , of course, but it’s not, I’m sensing, up the Academy’s 62 year-old white male alley. Hyde Park on Hudson feels more like a performance thing (i.e., Laura Linney). JA Bayona‘s The Impossible, I’ve been told, is a much better film than most people realize at this stage, and is thus looking like potential Best Picture material. To The Wonder = Terrence Potrzebie. The Sessions (which I’ve seen) is an acting thing. The Silver Linings Playbook, I’m told, is primarily an acting thing. I know nothing about The Place Beyond The Pines beyond the vague aroma of indie downeritude. Rust and Bone is an acting thing (i.e., Marion Cotillard).

Well, there goes another N.Y. Film Festival screening opportunity. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, a Weinstein Co, release, will now open on Friday, 9.14 rather than Friday, 10.12. So it’ll play the Venice Film Festival and then probably Toronto and maybe even Telluride, and open right after this flurry…and what I suspect will be a flurry of rave reviews.

And that’s not all — Andrew Dominik‘s Killing Me Softly, a moderately violent Weinstein release about an assassin (Brad Pitt) hunting down guys who’ve robbed a mob card game, is being bumped from 9.21 to 10.19.

You wanna hear my theory? These deck shufflings are all about Killing Me Softly and Harvey Weinstein‘s just-announced call for a summit discussion about screen violence. I’m thinking that if Harvey’s powwow happens sometime in mid or late August, let’s say, there would be a slight atmosphere of credibility erosion if the Weinstein Co. had a violent film coming out right around the corner. Nudging Killing Me Softly into late October will, I’m thinking, reduce that faint feeling of discomfort.

It’s just a theory, of course, but I’d like to hear from someone who believes these release-date changes would’ve been announced if Harvey hadn’t brought up the idea of a movie-violence summit. And explain the motivation without it.

How does a Los Angeles-based film lover not visit Monument Valley at least once? That’s what I’ve been asking myself off and on for the last 29 years. If you have any regard for the visual genius of John Ford and for the seven films he shot in this breathtaking shrine (including Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine and The Searchers), there’s just no excuse.

I know a guy who’s as much of a Movie Catholic as I am, a guy who eats, sleeps, drinks and injects movies 24/7, and he hadn’t even thought of visiting Monument Valley when I brought it up the other day. He asked me where it is. C’mon!

One reason more people don’t go, I’m guessing, is that it’s a hump to get there. You have to fly to Pheonix or Las Vegas and then drive five or six hours, and then you need to stay at Goulding’s Lodge or one of the three or four other places in the area (none of which are cheap), and when all is said and done it’ll set you back at least $700 or $800 bills if not a grand. But L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turanwent there sometime around May 2007, and I’ve decided to finally do it next week. Flying to Vegas late Wednesday, spending two and half days there, and then fly back Saturday. And probably some really shitty (or at the very least spotty) wifi.

The highlight will be riding a horse (probably an old paint) over hill and mesa for three or four hours on Friday afternoon. The last time I rode was in the Belizian jungle in ’88.

I’ve never liked and have never used the word “meal.” I enjoy dishes and dinners and bites and hors d’oeuvres and salads and slices, but I don’t eat effing “meals,” which to me sounds like a heaping plate you’d put before a serf or a day laborer at a banquet or picnic in the 1940s, some ghastly pile of ghoulash and home fries and broccoli with a glass of lemonade or beer. Q: Have you had your meal? A: No, and if somebody offered me a “meal” I wouldn’t look at it, much less eat it.

The one thing I didn’t like about David Fincher ‘s Se7en was when Kevin Spacey said that he’d killed a morbidly obese guy because he was so disgusting that “if you saw him walking down the street you wouldn’t be able to finish your meal.” And I didn’t like a song in the ’80s Doonesbury musical called “Memorable Meal.” I also don’t like words “plate” and “chow” and “grub.” And I don’t care for women who wolf their food down. Food should be consumed slowly, sparingly. Food preparation is art. High-end chefs (and I’m including the guys who prepare hot dogs at Pink’s) don’t serve “meals.”

I’ve honestly never used the word “meal” in my life, and after today I’ll never type it again. Go ahead — search Hollywood Elsewhere for the last seven years, or Jeffrey Wells on Google. You’ll never once find the word “meal” — “oatmeal” or “meal ticket,” perhaps, but never “meal” alone.